Kevin Nash has watched footage of himself winning world championships and does not remember being there.
He mentioned it on Kliq This, which he hosts with Sean Oliver, in response to a listener who asked whether he had ever wanted to add the NWA or TNA World Championship to the WWE and WCW titles he held.
He said that once he had won the first one, the ambition was finished.
“No, I mean I would have if somebody would have told me that they wanted me to do it. But once I won the WWE Championship, I was a world champion. I attained a goal when I broke in. I wanted to be a world champion.”
He said he was under no illusions about what it meant.
“I knew that didn’t mean you were the best. I just knew that it meant you were in a good position, and I wanted to be in that position.”
He then added something he had not been asked about.
“There’s several times in my life that I see clips of me winning world championship matches, and I have no recollection of them.”
Nash won the WWE Championship from Bob Backlund on November 26, 1994, at Madison Square Garden, eight seconds into the match, and held it for 358 days. Backlund had taken the title from Bret Hart three days earlier at Survivor Series, making him a transitional champion whose only job was to get it to Nash. Nash lost it back to Hart at Survivor Series the following year. It is the longest WWE Championship reign of the 1990s, and it made him the top man in the company at a point when the business was down.
He joined WCW in 1996 with Scott Hall, formed the nWo alongside Hulk Hogan, and won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship 5 times. The first came at Starrcade in December 1998 when he beat Goldberg to end an unbeaten run WCW had promoted heavily, a win followed a week later by the Fingerpoke of Doom, in which Nash lay down for Hulk Hogan on the first Nitro of 1999.
That makes six world title reigns across two championships, which is where the listener’s question came from. Twenty-one championships in total across the three companies. He also won twelve world tag team championships, nine of them in WCW, two in WWE, and one in TNA, and held the WWE Intercontinental Championship once. He worked for TNA across several spells from 2004 and won the Legends Championship twice there, but never its world title or the NWA version.
He has spoken elsewhere in the same episode about the physical cost of the career, including a quadriceps tear at 42 and both knees replaced since then, and has said that seven years is as long as a wrestler’s body can take.
Nash debuted in September 1990 and wrestled his last match in January 2020, a span of nearly 30 years. He is 67, was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2015 and again with the nWo in 2020, and now hosts Kliq This alongside Sean Oliver.
